[ORRR3] Let's Pick a Theme!

[JohnWordsworth]

"The time has come," the walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of boots- and rooms- and spiky-traps-- Of pitroot-bread-- and rings"

With the Glogg coding session today, I've been inspired to start the process of the ORRR3. I've been pondering some overall theme ideas and would love to hear what you think. Once we've decided upon a theme, I will put together a draft map and we can officially open the ORRR3 and have people join / pick rooms . Vote for up to 2.

Let us know which idea(s) you like!

Option 1. The champions are travelling to a nearby town when they are engulfed in a strange mist. When the mist clears, they find they are now in an eerie, deserted and frozen town. What did the inhabitants flee from? Assuming they had a chance to flee at all... [Ravenloft / Cthulhu-esque theme. Central area is an abandoned town. Roads go off to other locations with clues and items required to advance. Rooms in "sections" (easy, medium, hard), with a requirement to do X of Y rooms in each section to advance].

Option 2. The champions are prisoners who have been branded with magical tattoos and taken to an underground prison. After escaping, they find that they are in a large underground cavern with ratlings - also trapped here against their will. The heroes must find their way to the surface, free themselves of their magical bonds and get vengeance once and for all. [First area is escaping the underground. Most of the game is about removing the tattoos one at a time. Again - an X of Y rooms per section deal. Final boss fight to escape.]

Option 3. Darkness has fallen across the land and at the centre of it all is an abandoned wizard's tower in the Bacodar Foresst. The entrance to the upper floors is blocked by an invisible barrier, but the basement leads to 4 magical portals to undisclosed locations. Will the heroes unravel the mystery of the tower before it's too late? [High fantasy. The magical portals lead to realms of fire, earth, water and earth. Most rooms can be played in any order (apart from last section). Each realm requires 3 of 4 rooms to be complete.]

Option 4. The champions have been suffering terrible nightmares foretelling a dark future. Their dreams have led them to the Xafi desert, where a dark entity is amassing a horde of slaves and warriors to launch an attack on the cities of Vaccy and Sanchi. But to what end? [Desert themed. Individual quests (Sequences of 3-4 rooms) result in reducing the bad-guys forces for the final fight. Quests are optional, but you have to do most of them to have a chance in the final fight!]

[andyroosta]

Nice idea John..picked one.

[Drakkan]

voted for option 1
- Any town could be fine (not just frozen)
- the town itself could be some "neutral" ground for player I can imagine even some shops and NPC´s here
- it could be also ground for "neutral" moders which do not want create whole new areas, but just share some interesting ideas here (NPC conversation, new nice objects etc...)

[Frenchie]

I voted option 1, but the mist doesn't need to clear. All the houses lead to the rooms either above or under the ground. You are randomly teleported without knowing throughout the deserted town. Your average party level determines whether you can access a house or not keeping higher difficulty ones for higher levels. After you clear a house the inhabitants come back and give you a clue what happened to the town and in the end it leads to a graveyard's mausoleum for the end boss.

[JohnWordsworth]

Have set the poll to close next week so we have a deadline to get started on the next step.

@Frenchie: By 'mists have cleared' I still envisioned cemetary type effects to make the town spooky, just not the 'wall of grey' mists that led the party here originally. I think there has to be a mausoleum in there if we end up going with this theme! Hehe

@Drakkan: I mainly suggested frozen due to Skugg's awesome looking winter tile set :p. But yeah, after the initial period of exploration I think having the town area as a hub area would be cool.

[thomson]

+1 for a mist and abandoned town. Perhaps there could be a swamp nearby, with fog and not so healthy fumes? Some of the rooms can be underwater and could be accessible only after party achieves certain progression level (gets underwater breathing spell or scuba aparathus).

[Zo Kath Ra]

+1 for a mist and abandoned town. Perhaps there could be a swamp nearby, with fog and not so healthy fumes?

Or an abandoned town with not-so-healthy fumes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

[minmay]

This is a thoroughly peanut gallery comment, but I think you guys are focusing too much on the flavour of the setting, and not enough on its implications for designers. Options 1 and 4 sound quite constraining to me: it's hard to imagine fitting most of the ORRR1 and ORRR2 rooms to their themes. Option 2 would make outdoor "rooms" and the like awkward. Option 3 allows "magical portals" as a framing device that still makes sense in the context of the story, and offers a great deal of flexibility - it makes sense to us that a magical portal can go anywhere, which can hardly be said of houses in a town, doors in a prison, or wandering in the desert. But then, how much flexibility is too much? You still need the mod to be coherent overall (a major weakness of ORRR1 was a lack of coherence, IMO - transitions between rooms were jarring and there was a lack of overall structure to orient and motivate players).
Therefore, I would say a better starting point would be to figure out how much freedom you want room designers to have:
- Should rooms conform to a certain kind of environment? E.g. should the entire mod take place underground, aboveground, in a single building? If so, something with a relatively natural setting like options 1, 2, or 4 is a natural choice. If not, something that supports a convenient hand-wave, like the magical portals in option 3, is better.
- How heavily should the type of puzzles, challenges, etc. in a room be constrained? If you want a "serious", tightly-knit mod where puzzles tie into the plot, then you want a more explicit and detailed story like options 1 and 4 seem to be going for. If you want something looser like ORRR1 and 2, then you want a minimal story like option 3.
- etc.

I'm not going to take a side on this yet (though I admit to voting for option 3) but I think it's the most important thing to discuss.

[THOM]

In the pre-discussion it was said, that our modders are interested in both: indoor and outdoor spaces. So it is nessecary to allow both.
I don't see, why an abandoned town should not give us the possibility.

But I agree that it would be good to decide if we want to have a general story that our rooms have to support. I would say 'yes'. Maybe not all ideas will be possible then, maybe some environments can't be used (i.e. beach or desert), but the whole mod would probably become more cohesive.

[JohnWordsworth]

Great point minmay. I personally feel we want the freedom to make mostly whatever you want - with just a few restrictions, because having a central theme definitely made for a better experience in the ORRR2.

I had mostly envisioned a system where the rooms all tie into the same plot, but in a loose way (unless the room designer specifically wants to integrate better). I don't want to put people off from joining the mod based on restrictions, so I was thinking the minimum would be "you should put this item in your room" (it might be a note/key/gem etc). We would design the overall layout of the mod before starting, with different areas and rooms for people to 'claim', so maybe not all tile sets would feature in the mod, but there would be some variation.

In terms of options 1 and 4, I guess I also envisioned it to be about 50/50 dungeons and outdoor space. Outdoor spaces would be assigned, maybe something like 13x13x2 floors (a sewer underneath if you like) and indoor spaces would be the old fashioned 9x9x3. For option 1, I would envision the central town to be a hub, with maybe a tower, mausoleum and a dungeon somewhere too (whatever, not thought about the specifics) to make for some variation. For options 2 and 3, I pictured it to be more "indoors" than outdoors - but the simplicity of that might make designing rooms easier and less stressful for beginners...

Just my initial thoughts though - I really want to make sure we're building what the most people want, so it's most fun for everyone involved!